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9/06/2013

I Crush Ants For A Living

My hands just wouldn't stop shaking. I felt oddly calm on the inside, but my body appeared to be in disagreement with that other part of me. The thing that just happened, it happens every day. However I couldn't imagine how the exact same thing could have happened at all, to me or anyone else. And why I've never been warned on how awful it would be like!

I wish I could have kept my knees from shaking so much. They banged into one another like two clumsy sticks. I also remember cursing a lot. Cursing and shaking knees don't go together all that well. Still, this is what being all-powerful means. It means running over animals with your car when you least expect it. It means overstretching the gap between life and death within seconds. Couldn't it have been at least something else, I pleaded, something smaller, and not the beautiful red-and-white creature that came out of nowhere, wanting to cross the street in a hurry? Then again, what an odd impulse, trying to figure out ways to lighten up a horrible scenario. It's never cheerful.

After the initial shock had worn off, I parked the car and went back to look for the remains of the cat. I went looking along the roadside, under bushes and I even waded through a remote stretch of tall grass. Cats have a habit of going into hiding when injured. A big part of me didn't want to see that. The other part wanted to randomly ring every doorbell in the area and apologize to whoever opened first.

For someone who in life doesn't feel all that powerful, I realized in this one split second that I do have a lot of impact on my surroundings. Impact being the operative word..

I never found the dead body, or, what would have been worse, a half-dead body. The cat could have run further, even with two broken hind legs, which would have been a best-case scenario.

On another note, I crush ants for a living and I am not even aware when it happens. Being alive causes so much death and suffering, it makes remorse a strange reaction to the effects of existence. I can't help being a freighter in a world of canoes. I'm a freighter hoping to merely have broken the paddle of a certain red-and-white canoe...